Cayetano Ferrer: Fragments of Los Angeles County Folly Ruin

Cayetano Ferrer offers a glimpse into a contemporary ruin, scavenging fragments from the rubble of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1965 campus and repurposing them as both sculptural objects and archaeological index.

In this work-in-progress, Ferrer generates a certain liminal categorization: chunks of ambiguous urban material operate differently when isolated from their original structure, inviting the viewer to consider them as fossils decontextualized by distance and time—and yet they are unavoidably metonymic, ever conjuring their demolished whole. Vestiges of building safety codes and municipal regulations along with notions of public architecture and a late-mid-century vernacular haunt these fragments, which stand in for a collective past rendered disposable by the machinations of a city forever under construction.

This presentation is a formal viewing of these objects as they were extracted, before undergoing any significant restoration process. Eventually, the LACMA remnants will be re-integrated into the civic landscape as a public park—a material irony embedded within the cycle of aesthetic and structural turnover. Amidst a complex topology of intent and reception, the relays between past and present inevitably complicate meaning, guaranteeing an instability that is fleeting and arbitrary as the shape of time.